Deadline Looms On Radioactive Waste Disposal

Representatives Of Eight Southeastern States Favor Asking South Carolina To Keep Accepting The Hazardous Wastes Until 1996.

October 25, 1991|By Luz Villarreal Of The Sentinel Staff

LAKE BUENA VISTA — Time is running out for Florida and seven other Southeastern states looking for a place to store enough low-level radioactive waste to fill half the Florida Citrus Bowl.

On Dec. 31, 1992, the region's only licensed disposal facility in Barnwell, S.C., is scheduled to close.

A committee representing the eight states as part of the Southeast Compact Commission may have a solution - to persuade the South Carolina center to stay open until 1996, when a new facility is expected to open. The committee voted to pursue that option Thursday at a meeting at the Grosvenor Resort in Lake Buena Vista.

The Southeast Compact is one of nine compacts across the country struggling with where to dispose of hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of such waste.

The waste includes contaminated clothing, machinery, tools, research animal carcasses, filters, trash and other materials mostly generated by nuclear power plants, hospitals, laboratories, universities and industries.

Two tracts in North Carolina - one in Richmond and another straddling the Wake-Chatham County line - have been targeted by the North Carolina Low-Level Waste Management Authority as potential sites for a new dump.

''This is our No. 1 priority because it's (the deadline) already walked on top of us,'' said James L. Setser, representing Georgia and chairman of the planning committee.

The full commission is expected to make a decision today on the committee's recommendation.

The commission will meet at 9 a.m. at the resort.

Even if the commission approves the recommendation, it won't be easy to keep the 20-year-old Barnwell facility open. The South Carolina legislature would have to agree, and that's not going to be easy, committee members say.

''It's politically a very explosive issue in South Carolina,'' said Dr. Richard S. Hodes of Tampa, chairman of the commission.

Carl Roberts, a commission member from South Carolina, voted against the recommendation.

''I think people in South Carolina are fed up,'' he said.

''I don't know if the General Assembly is going to vote for keeping it open.''

The Southeast Compact Commission represents Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Of those states, Florida produced in 1990 about 25,000 cubic feet of low level waste, which was 7 percent of the compact's total.

The compact was formed under a 1980 federal law requiring states to dispose of their own low-level radioactive waste or to form partnerships with other states and establish a mutual dumping ground.

Two commissioners from each state make up the commission board.

Besides Barnwell, the only other two licensed facilities accepting such waste are in Hanford, Wash., and Beatty, Nev.

Both also are scheduled to shut their doors on Dec. 31, 1992.

The Hanford site, however, will remain open as the host site for the seven-member Northwest Compact.

If compacts or unaffiliated states fail to have a licensed facility by 1996, Congress will make the states the owners of and liable for what happens to the waste.

Right now, the responsibility for handling the waste belongs to those who generate it.

Other options discussed Thursday by committee members were:

- To store the waste where it was created until a new facility is opened.

- To build a temporary storage facility in one of the eight compact states.

- To persuade another regional compact to accept the waste until the North Carolina dump is open.